Climate Change on the Alaska Highway

If you want to drive into or out of Alaska, at some point you will find yourself on the Alaska Highway. Sometimes colloquially referred to as the Alcan, it is a beautiful drive, from central Alaska into Canada, down through Yukon and into British Columbia, officially ending at Dawson Creek just shy of the Alberta border. The highway twists and turns pasts rivers, lakes and hot springs, through forests and around the base of mountains; bison can appear (I can attest from experience) around the corner at anytime, as can bears.

The road would traverse 1,500 miles of mountainous subarctic terrain, most of it unsettled, heavily forested and unmapped. Engineers would face fierce cold, fierce heat, vicious insects, and vast stretches of permafrost and boggy terrain called muskeg that swallowed bulldozers whole. Nevertheless, the Alaska Canada Military Highway was declared open the following October. Nicknamed the Alcan, this so-called pioneer road was little more than a gravel lane passable only by military trucks. Still, people called it the 20th century’s greatest engineering feat, after only the Panama Canal.

Today, the road is paved from start to finish, and connects to other, similarly-well-paved, roads at either end. Increasingly, however, as Dean also notes, its maintenance is problematic. The reason is found beneath its surface, in the form of permafrost, the permanently-frozen layer of ground that underlies much of the highway and is a defining presence of terrestrial Arctic and sub-Arctic environments. As Alaska warms, and as dark pavement absorbs more sunlight and thus warms the ground below, that permafrost is beginning to melt; in many places the road is cracking and sinking.

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There is potentially still greater concern about this permafrost melt: it has been estimated that permaforst contains twice as much carbon as the atmosphere, and as that carbon – in the form of carbon dioxide and methane – is released, it will serve only to further intensify warming.

Should that happen, the result would be something of a "ticking time bomb" that would have profound consequences – consequences far more severe than potholes in a 70-year-old road.